Give shouldn't be in quotes. They literally had to give women the right to vote.

When you do not have power, you do not "win" rights in the abstract. When you "win", the nature of the victory is that those who do have power will act on your behalf.

This is not to say that winning over the men who needed to do the giving was not a difficult process, nor does it say that it was fair that they had to. But that was the task, and it is the usual task when you don't have power.

When you do have power, if you want more, or you want something you don't have, you can often just take it. For instance, when the United States wanted more land, it annexed Texas which was under the control of Mexico but had a lot of settlers from the United States. "Texas" drew the borders more or less where it wanted, leading to war with Mexico (which the U.S. won). You don't have to just take it (the U.S. bought Alaska, for instance), but it's an option.

When you don't have power, you're left to use that lesser power that you are afforded to be sufficiently disruptive so that people will give what you want in exchange for a lack of disruption, or you need to convince the people in power that it is in their interest positively for you to have what you want (i.e. it will help them too), or you need to convince them that it is fundamentally the right thing to do for you to have what you want. None of these are meaningfully "taking". That's simply not the nature of the power dynamic. "Winning" consists of convincing enough of the power, by whichever means, so that you can get your wishes enacted over the objections of the portion of power who is unconvinced.

Semantics are extremely important here because if you get them too far wrong (as you did), you end up thinking that you are in a totally different kind of scenario than you actually are.

I didn't comment on the other things, as per my explanation at the end of my previous message, because none of them seemed egregiously wrong. Some seemed debatable, some were good points, some really weren't.

But getting the power dynamic exactly backwards, so that you confuse the cases where "taking" works (i.e. the unilateral exercise of power) to the cases where persuasion is necessary, was so egregiously wrong that I did not feel it appropriate to keep quiet.

This takes nothing away from the accomplishments of the leaders and members of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. The names of Anthony and Catt, at the very least, deserve more acclaim today than they receive. But it is also important to recognize what they did: they convinced people.

And, in fact, a lot of it wasn't their doing at all, though they laid the groundwork and capitalized brilliantly on the opportunity. A lot of it came from the necessities of World War I, where women took over a huge number of roles normally reserved for men--and did a stellar job, which really debunked a lot of the anti-suffrage arguments in the most blatantly obvious way.

And even then, the 19th amendment barely passed.

And on the topic of "taking" vs. "convincing", although the militant tactics of the National Women's Party may have played an important role in re-igniting the issue, it was not the NWP but the National American Woman Suffrage Association (with many more members) whose large membership, focus on consensus and persuasive arguments, and general non-extremism, while still very firmly being for the right of women to vote that is generally considered to have won the day.

Abortion is in the position of the suffrage movement after WWI. It needs a NAWSA, not a NWP.